


Sharing the Sea

by SassSexandSmut



Series: Laws of Motion [3]
Category: NCIS, The Fall (TV 2013)
Genre: But No One Is Straight, Canon? What Canon?, F/F, Leroy Jethro Gibbs (mentioned) - Freeform, Meta (disguised Meta), Smut, Straight Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 00:50:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13559175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SassSexandSmut/pseuds/SassSexandSmut
Summary: I said when I wrote 'Paper Airplanes' that it was one of two futures for Stella and Jenny. This is the other future; it's considerably less dire, and considerably more erotic. You don't need to have read the other two stories for this to make sense.Jenny is given the go-ahead for a controversial operation, and she knows she's being set up to fail. Someone is preparing her to crash and burn, so he can nail her to a banner and fly her high as the woman who was too emotional to hold a position of political power. It's all too familiar a narrative, and Jen wants nothing to do with it, so she asks Stella to talk her out of the operation.





	Sharing the Sea

Stella drops her bag by the front door. She slips off her heels, untucks her blouse, follows Jenny into the study—a tiny room with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, an easy chair, and a work coffee table. Jenny stokes the fire tentatively before sitting with her legs crossed on the carpet. Her fingers drum the folder on her lap. “Take the chair,” she says, gesturing to the dark paisley chair that looks like it’s sat here for centuries. The hearth light cuts her a sharp silhouette, lighting up her nose and the tips of her hair. She glows like the tip of an expensive cigar—classy, familiar, dangerous. Stella is well aware her life would be easier without Jenny Shepard.

 

“How many days off did you take?” Jenny pours her a glass of wine the size of a goldfish bowl.

 

“Three,” says Stella, accepting the wine glass with a wan smile. She untucks her blouse from her slacks and tucks her feet beneath her on the chair. She furrows her brow at the file in Jenny’s hand.

 

“You didn’t book a hotel, did you?” Jenny arches an eyebrow.

 

“No.”

 

Jenny nods. “Good.”

 

Stella gulps down half the wine glass. “Why did you ask me to come?” She’s not about to beat around the bush. Jenny never called, rather turned up at Stella’s London flat at some ungodly hour and said she was in town for a couple days. That Jenny bothered to ring her up, ask if she’d take a vacation, was enough to set Stella on edge; not mention she had asked twice if the line was secure. Stella had chuckled—her personal phone was even more secure than the Met line in her office—but that question alone had unnerved her. Jenny Shepard breathes confidentiality. She has to, if she wants to stay Director of NCIS. She buries classifieds in her throat when she dials Stella’s phone at midnight, and when she walks into work each morning she has to swallow Stella’s name off her tongue.

 

Stella doesn’t mind the secrets—after all, she’s got secrets of her own. Jenny doesn’t tell her much, but she does tell her the truth. She’s read that much correctly.

 

 

_ She finds Jen Shepard on her doorstep for the second time this year. Their’s is an odd relationship—she supposed they were each other’s exceptions. She says “I made coffee” in place of a ‘hello’ that their familiarity made obsolete. Her hair is still damp, and she knows she smells like chlorine and coffee grounds before she’s taken a shower in the morning. _

_ Standing at the door, short red hair plastered to her skull, soaked by the London rain she clearly hasn’t prepared for, Jenny’s frown lines give her sass when she smiles. Her smile lines give her history when she speaks— “forgo the coffee”—and steps over the threshold, capturing Stella’s lips with hers.  _

_ Jenny’s hands dutifully explore her curves and sharp edges. Perhaps she’s searching for scars, the inevitable battle wounds that mark each case Stella solves, that Jen will kiss until they go numb. She doesn’t dwell on it, instead breathing in the smell of damp cotton and Jenny’s cinnamon shampoo. She pries at Jenny’s lips, heedless of her lover’s wine-colored lipstick, and she’s granted entry with soft moan. Wordlessly, she kicks shut her front door and backs Jenny into it, grasping the hem of her rain-damp sweater. _

_ “I missed you,” she whispers in Jen’s ear. It’s true. She misses Jenny, even when she doesn’t expect her to arrive. _

 

Jenny breathes a beleagured sigh and tosses a file at her. Stella raises a questioning eyebrow—she’s not going to read classified documents without Jenny’s express permission. When Jenny offers a nod, she glances at the first line, and immediately feels her frown lines deepen. She cringes.

 

“It’s bullshit,” Jenny growls. “Some Hollywood camera crew wants to follow my agents around—follow  _ me  _ around—and make a fucking documentary of it. Normally I’d toss this without a second thought, but SECNAV practically ordered me to sign off on it.”

 

“Transparency?” Stella guesses. Politicians took every opportunity they could to be transparent without giving the public any valuable understanding of how their governments operate.

 

Jenny nods grudgingly, running her fingers through mussed up hair. “I’m all for transparency, but this is  _ not  _ an effective vehicle of information. Giving the Hollywood schmucks unlimited footage of my major case agents on duty, my formal meetings and daily interactions, can only fuck me over.”

 

“What’s your greatest concern?” She knows what Jenny will say. They’re women presiding over male-dominated fields, giving the orders to men who resent their ambition. It’s not their power that isolates them; it’s the fact that they actively pursued such power. It’s easy to transform an ambitious woman into a dominatrix, if you see her through a distorted lense.

 

_ “Sometimes I think about quitting this political shitshow and hopping on a one-way flight to London.” _

_ Stella rolls over to look at her. She appreciates the sincerity of Jenny’s eyes, round and amber like grass just starting to die in the dry season. Jen sprawls on the kitchen floor in just her slacks, short red hair smushed into the hardwood, limbs splayed beneath the lamplight. Her chest rises, falls, rises, falls, and for a long time Stella watches. They are an intricate ballet, and she fears that if they speak, it will wreck the performance. _

_ “You shouldn’t do that.” She will never be afraid to speak. _

_ Jenny smiles mischievously. “Why shouldn’t I?”  _

_ She should know better by now—Jenny’s first instinct is defiance. It’s a playful defiance, but Stella is not a playful person. “You’re crushing walls every day,” she replies solemnly. “You are a woman working an unforgiving job that hundreds of men believe a woman can’t do. Like it or not, you’ve shouldered the responsibility to prove them wrong.” _

 

“I’m the director,” she says, resigned. “I’m young, and I’m a woman. It’s too easy to make me the bad guy. It’s just as easy for a camera director as it is for a federal agency to reveal only what he wants people see. I’m not going to lie—I butt heads with a lot of higher-ups, Stella, and that last thing I want is to be a spectacle.”

 

Stella drops to the floor beside her. Jen’s frustration is all too familiar—she feels it every time a reporter accosts her about a case, every time her sex life becomes tabloid fodder. They are single, ambitious women—sexual women—and all it takes is bit part in the local newspaper or a couple stray words to make them radical, power-hungry, slightly vampiric. 

 

“You argue with a man, you’re a ball-breaker,” Jenny rants, tossing the folder on the floor. “You argue with a woman, and it’s a catfight. I can’t fucking win.”

 

“I know.” She rests a hand on Jenny’s shoulder. It’s not an easy gesture—it goes against every instinct in her body, every attempt she’s made to become an island. But neither is Jenny Shepard seeking traditional comfort, traditional sweetness, or a traditional relationship. They are not islands, but ships—never still, always sailing. Individual vessels with their own captains, they never close the cannon ports and together fight the wind. “We never win. We only struggle, and it’s a good day if we haven’t lost.”

“I know.” Jenny huffs. 

Stella arches an eyebrow. “What did you need me for?”

“This.” Jenny procures another folder from the coffee table and waves it ominously. Stella reaches for it, but she snatches it away. “Classified,” she says nonchalantly. Her shoulder slump. “My whole damn job is a sea of blacked out type and redacted information.”

“I understand.” If she minded, she would be pursuing a political career. Jenny saw the world on a larger scale—she was an excellent negotiator and a treasure trove of innovative ideas, but those ideas could only be implemented in a high place. Stella picked her way through individual cases, solving puzzles by throwing herself into the thick of them. She saw the devil in the details. 

 

_ She stares for longer than she should at the button on Jenny’s blazer, where it lies crumbled beside her. The wine—and the sex, undoubtedly—have left a pleasant buzz in her head. One moment she feels as though she’s drifing through space; the next, she feels frozen, her gaze fixed on the button’s intricate designs. A creature engraved into the brass button crouches as though it’s about to spring upon prey. She can’t decide if it’s a cat or a dragon. _

_ Beside her, Jenny lies flushed and loose-limbed, her eyes closed, her hands behind her head. Red lip stain smears over her mouth, beneath her cheekbones. She smells like red wine honey, and gunpowder from an afternoon she spent at the firing range. _

 

She crossed her legs and looked Jenny square in the eye. “Does your classified document have something to do with the camera crew sanctioned to wander through your agency?” 

 

“Probably,” Jenny said curtly. Her fingernails tapped the folder. She pressed her lips together, and Stella saw the flex of her jaw as she swallowed. “It’s a deep cover sting operation against a heavyweight arms dealer. I sent my proposal for the op a week ago, and it was approved so quickly I started to think I was being set up.”

 

Stella couldn’t keep the surprise from her face. “Set up to be killed?” she said incredulously.

Jenny shook her head. “Set up to fail,” she explained. “Crash and burn. Have my sorry ass kicked out of Washington in disgrace. See—” she took a deep breath. “The target is on a CIA leash. His moral compass points toward the bank, and the United States government is willing to thumb out more money for his… goods… than anyone else. That isn’t to say he’s not responsible for some missing people, and no doubt some nameless corpses decomposing in the Potomac. But I proposed the sting op as a long shot, hoping against hope and expecting it to be denied.”

 

“Why propose it at all?”

 

When Jenny tenses noticeably, she wonders whether she should push the subject further. But she flew across the Atlantic at the drop of a hat for Jen, and she deserves to know why she came. 

 

_ Stella turns her head to the side, so her nose bumps Jenny’s bare shoulder. Maybe she’s drunk; maybe she’s not drunk enough. There’s a magic number, somewhere—sober enough to enjoy sex, drunk enough not to focus on the details for once in her damn life. That’s what sex was, after all—the one time she wasn’t zeroed in on the slightest details, staring at them for so long she got cross and cross-eyed. She can’t help but wonder—if she never noticed Jenny’s details, the scratch in her voice like a record player, the smell of gunpowder on her skin, the crack of her wit and endless supply of comebacks—would she have remembered her? _

_ She’d recognized Jenny Shepard instantly, the second time they met, in spite of a hair cut and an accumulation of smile lines. She’d recognized her over the bow of her violin on that park bench, beneath the glow of streetlights and neon club signs. And she’d been happy to see her. _

 

“He fucked you over?” she guesses.

 

“He killed my father,” says Jen, too quickly, and that tips Stella off—this murder may or may not have happened. 

Stella sighs—she knows this story. She’s lived this story, and she has to stop herself from saying so. Her own father—his life, his death, the cliche cautionary tale he became—does not belong in Jenny’s living room. He belongs to another night, with another fire crackling in the hearth, in Stella’s own flat with the London rain pattering outside. They must store their ghosts in their own homes, lest they accidentally take up each others’. 

 

“Why are you telling  _ me _ ?”

 

“Because my hand is inches away from signing this operation forward, and I need you to talk me out of it. I know it’s only on my desk because some bureaucratic misogynist is looking for a reason to call me unfit to be Director. There’s a senator, somewhere, waiting for me to fail before a hungry camera, waiting for one more woman to call ‘hormonal’ and ‘emotional,’ as if his own history doesn’t inform every decision he makes in office.

 

“Dammit, Stella.” She looks up, a film over her eyes. “Every bitter bone in my body tells me to take retribution against the man who robbed me of a father. But if I do, I lose everything I’ve worked so hard to achieve. There is greater justice in this world than taking an eye for an eye; if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be here. I never would have gone undercover, or joined a federal system inherently rigged against me.” She sniffs, then draws her brows together and steels her expression. “I could never ask this of a man, not even Gibbs. He trained me, and I’d trust him with my life, but I will not ask any man to talk me out of this decision—not in my field, not with only a year in this job, not while keeping hold of myself.”

 

“I know,” Stella says softly. “You seem to have talked yourself out of it all on your own.” There are things a woman like Director Jenny Shepard cannot risk—her stoicism, her composure, her pride. There are questions and favors she can ask a man, and this is not one of them. To get as far as she had, Jenny Shepard had made herself indestructible. She’s a stone tower reaching for the sky, but as time and exhaustion wore her down, someone had to fill in the cracks. To her own surprise, Stella is happy to do so.

 

Jenny nods somberly. “I needed to work this out aloud. I needed to explain it to  _ someone  _ because out loud I know what I have to do—professionally, I need to throw this op aside. Retribution is not worth sacrificing my professional goals.”

 

“It’s never wrong to grieve or rage, but you deserve better than a temporary, vengeful satisfaction that you’ll pay for the rest of your life.” Stella had to learn to shelve her grief a child, else she’d be cutting off pieces of herself and sacrificing them to grief until the day she died.

 

“I’ve made up my mind, but I needed you here to explain myself. You remind me of everything I’m working for, Stella—the difference I’m trying to make for the women who come after me.”

 

"You as well, Director Shepard." She tilts Jenny’s chin and kisses her, leaning forward until her knees can’t take it. She tumbles forward, her hands roaming down Jen’s body, feeling the flex of her shoulders and the rise of her chest. “You’re frustrated,” she says, breaking the kiss. “Let me rectify that.”

 

Jenny’s fingers flutter down her back until they find the hem of her shirt. “Absolutely,” she mumbled, pulling Stella’s sweater over her head.

 

It’s odd to Stella, turning up at Jenny’s door in a wool sweater, bearing a three-day travel bag. Her pencil skirt and high heels—her armor and shield—lie tucked away in her suitcase, and when she walked in the door she basked in the silence of her bare feet on Jenny’s wood floor. They are intimate, but never settled; they never allow themselves to get so comfortable that they forget the infinite futures before them. Perhaps one of them will die unexpectedly; perhaps their relationship will come to an abrupt end, for one reason or another. When they touched, there remained an invisble wall, infinitely thin, separating them. It was necessary. 

 

She doesn’t drag out the foreplay—their lives have left them exhausted—but slips her hand beneath the waistband of Jenny’s slacks and silk underwear, eliciting a husky moan. Jen’s back presses into the coffee table, and while she’s careful not to press too hard, she knows this side of Jenny—the hot-and-bothered side, the tight-muscled, coiled spring demanding a rough orgasm in the living room. Fuck the bed; Jenny’s clipped red fingernails trail down her back, and she flexes beneath their touch. Fuck the nakedness; she leaves her hand in Jenny’s ever-the-professional slacks and presses two fingers to her clit, wrist straining against the zipper. Fuck any man who dares to try an oust Jenny from her job. 

The coffee table groans, and Stella’s knees dig into the floor, and she picks up the pace, her thumb grinding against Jen’s clit. She feels Jenny press her freckled cheekbone to her jaw, breathe against her ear, and it sends a shock straight to her center. This won’t end on the table.

 

“Faster,” escapes in a whisper, and Stella obliges until she feels Jen’s back arch into the edge of the coffee table and moves with her until they can lie side by side on the floor.

 

“We’ve finally christened my living room,” Jenny observes with a wry chuckle. Stella lies beside her and watches her catch her breath, just as she did in London all those months ago. Finally Jen to her feet and with the other picks up her shirt.

 

“Bedroom?” she asks, arching her eyebrow. It’s not really a question.

 

How did she get here—somewhere between late night phone calls, orgasms in her bed to Jen’s husky voice on speaker, and the moments they share on a park bench along a busy street, they had crept irreversibly into each other’s solitary lives. They were not a couple, not by the dictionary’s definition. They stood alone at their ends of the earth like lighthouses flashing to one another over the sea. Then one day, sailing somewhere in between, ancient well-armed vessels in a thrashing sea, they met. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you look closely you can see the grainy outline of me flipping off everyone in the NCIS writers room and CBS headquarters. I felt like Jenny's narrative got fucked over, and this piece is my solution.
> 
> I would also like to state for the record that I never thought Jenny Shepard was canonically straight. In my head she's the patron saint of gun-toting procedural drama bisexuals (Stella Gibson existing outside the weird world of American procedurals).


End file.
